Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare, and the Triumph of Anglo-America
Author: Kevin Phillips
The question at the heart of The Cousins’ Wars is this: How did Anglo-America evolve over a mere three hundred years from a small Tudor kingdom into a global community with such a hegemonic grip on the world today, while no other European power - Spain, France, Germany, or Russia - did? The answer to this, according to Phillips, lies in a close examination of three internecine English-speaking civil wars the English Civil War, the American Revolution, and the American Civil War. These wars between cousins functioned as crucial anvils on which various religious, ethnic, and political alliances were hammered out between the English-speaking cousin-nations, setting them on a unique two-track path toward world leadership - one aristocratic and aloof to dominate the imperial nineteenth century and the other more egalitarian and democratic to take over in the twentieth century. They also functioned as unfortunate and deadly cultural crucibles for African Americans, Native Americans, and the Irish.Phillips’s analysis shows exactly how these conflicts are inextricably linked and how they seeded each other. He offers often surprising interpretations that cut across the political spectrum - for instance, that the Constitution of the United States, while brilliant in many respects, was also a fatally flawed political compromise that contributed mightily in setting the stage for the final - and the bloodiest - cousins’ war: the American Civil War.With the new millennium upon us and triggering widespread assessment of our nation’s place in world history, The Cousins’ Wars provides just the kind of magisterial sweep and revisionist spark to ignitewidespread interest and debate. This grand religious, military, and political epic is the multi-dimensional story of the triumph of Anglo-America.
Lance Morrow
The Cousins' Wars makes a daringly bulky package of history. In busy conversational style Phillips bustles about his enormous thesis, rechecking the ropes and knots with which he has bound it. If he finds a knot he thinks too loose, he reties it three or four times. The result is fussy but immensely impressive. -- Time Magazine
New Yorker Magazine
[A] splendid book...Every step of the way, Phillips extracts news from history.
National Review - Michael Lind
His magnum opus...Phillips applies his trademark brand of scholarship to a subject grander than any before, with results that are always thought-provoking.
Publishers Weekly
Phillips (Arrogant Capital) is one of the most influential political analysts in America. In 1969, his The Emerging Republican Majority correctly predicted that the Republicans would become the majority party by taking control of the then Democratic South. Now, turning to the past, he offers this ambitious account of how "Anglo-America"--his term for the cultural and political axis and kinship of the U.S. and Britain--came to dominate the political, linguistic and economic shape of the world. His thesis is sweeping: a trio of wars--the English Civil War, the American Revolution and the U.S. Civil War--were a single crucible out of which a dominant Anglo-America emerged. In each of these "cousins' wars," maintains Phillips, the catalytic groups were similar: Puritans from Eastern England (East Anglia) in the 1640s; their Yankee descendants in New England in 1775 and 1860. Moreover, he argues, each of the three wars reaffirmed and spurred Anglo-America's expansionism, as well as the belief of British imperialists and American pioneers that they were God's chosen people with a manifest destiny to fulfill. Phillips emphasizes the plight of the cousins' wars' principal losers: black slaves and ex-slaves, Native Americans, the Irish. Interestingly, he counts Germans among the losers, arguing that Anglo-American ascendancy and waves of European emigration to the U.S. diminished the relative clout of German-Americans and thwarted Germany's expansionist ambitions. As in his political analyses, Phillips pays close attention to ethnic, religious, class and electoral divisions. At times, his thoroughness makes for slow, somewhat wonky going, but on balance this is a tremendously rewarding work full of startling connections and provocative syntheses. Agent, Bill Leigh. (Feb.)
Booknews
A sweeping history encompassing military, political, and religious themes in its discussion of how America evolved over 300 years into a powerful global community, and why other European powers did not. Phillips, a seasoned author of eight prior books, focuses on the English Civil War, the American Revolution, and the American Civil War in search of the factors contributing to America's position in the world today. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
The New York Times Book Review - Richard Brookhiser
A juicy, provocative account of where we have come from...Phillips's details are as marvelous as they are copious.
National Review - Michael Lind
His magnum opus...Phillips applies his trademark brand of scholarship to a subject grander than any before, with results that are always thought-provoking.
Books & Culture: A Christian Review - John Wilson
...[A] book with nerve to spare and a thesis sweeping and ambitious enough to send fastidious microhistorians into a tizzy....[A] feast of a book, not only for academics with a professional interest...but for all readers with a yen for full-blooded history.
Boston Globe - Joseph J. Ellis
An admirably feisty, take-no-prisoners book, in the spirit of Oliver Cromwell and William Tecumseh Sherman, that no serious students of English and American history ought to miss or dismiss.
Newsweek - Peter McGrath
Phillips....goes global, attempting an explanation of Anglo-American "hegemony" in the world. It lies, he says, in civil war....most interesting when it takes up the Civil War.
What People Are Saying
John M. Murrin
This is an elegant and provocative book...Not everyone will agree with everything Phillips says, but he does offer a bold synthesis that ought to stimulate public debate while it helps to enlighten us all.
Walter Dean Burnham
Kevin Phillips has done it again: he has surprised and delighted us...The Cousins' Wars is an exciting review of Anglo-America in the making.
Thomas Fleming
Kevin Phillips has written a remarkable book, tracing subterranean psychological and spiritual connections across decades of peace and war that most historians have ignored. His insights on the religious undercurrents of the American Revolution are particularly striking.
—(Thomas Fleming, author of Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Future of America)
Sean Wilentz
This is Kevin Phillips' masterwork. The Cousins' Wars is a brilliant examination of the political and religious underpinnings of Anglo—America. A big, exciting and noble undertaking.
—(Sean Wilentz, Professor of History, Princeton University)
Sean Wilentz
This is Kevin Phillips' masterwork. The Cousins' Wars is a brilliant examination of the political and religious underpinnings of Anglo-America. A big, exciting, and noble undertaking. -- Princeton University
Go to: Investment Management P or Japans Policy Trap
The China Price: The True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage
Author: Alexandra Harney
Alexandra Harney uncovers the truth about how China is able to offer such amazingly low prices to the rest of the world. She has discovered that intense pricing pressure from Western companies combined with ubiquitous corruption and a lack of transparency exacts an unseen and unconscionable toll in human misery and environmental damage.
Publishers Weekly
Dreaded by competitors, "the China price" has become "the lowest price possible," the hallmark of China's incredibly cheap, ubiquitous manufacturers. Financial Timeseditor Harney explores the hidden price tag for China's economic juggernaut. It's a familiar but engrossing tale of Dickensian industrialization. Chinese factory hands work endless hours for miserable wages in dusty, sweltering workshops, slowly succumbing to occupational ailments or suddenly losing a limb to a machine. Coal-fired power plants spew pollutants into nearly unbreathable air. Migrants from the countryside, harassed by China's hukousystem of internal passports, form a readily exploitable labor pool with few legal protections. The system is fueled by Western investment and, Harney observes, hypocrisy. Retailers like Wal-Mart impose social responsibility codes on their Chinese suppliers, but refuse to pay the costs of raising labor standards; the result is a pervasive system of cheating through fake employment records and secret uninspected factories, to which Western companies turn a blind eye. But Harney also finds stirrings of change; aided by regional labor shortages, rising wages and intrepid activists. Chinese workers are demanding-and gradually winning-more rights. Packed with facts, figures and sympathetic portraits of Chinese workers and managers, Harney's is a perceptive take on the world's workshop. (Mar. 31)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationMorgen Witzel - The Financial Times Limited
Anyone running a company that outsources manufacturing to China, or is thinking of doing so, needs to read this book.
Kirkus Reviews
Financial Times reporter Harney paints a vivid portrait of factory life in the country that sells consumer goods for the lowest price possible. With a manufacturing workforce of 104 million people, China dominates global production of consumer goods, selling everything from clothing to computer parts at half or even one-fifth the amount that it would cost to make them in the United States. The author, who lives in Hong Kong, focuses on the consequences of China's ceaseless pursuit of economic growth, from unethical business practices to pollution to an epidemic of occupational diseases. Drawing on interviews, she takes us into factories and their dormitories to show youths who have flocked from the countryside to take dangerous manufacturing jobs. We meet 17-year-old Li Gang, who worked 18 hours a day, seven days a week to earn $39 monthly as a zagong ("dogsbody"), the lowest-ranking employee in a plastic-bag factory; and Li Luyuan, 20, who sleeps in cramped quarters with a dozen other girls, trying to save enough money from her job producing DVDs and sweaters to buy a new home for her parents. These migrants are taking legal action to win better working conditions, posing a challenge to efforts to maintain the China price. Harney brings us into model factories, where rules on working hours and product safety are followed, and into the "shadow" factories (often operated under contract to the same owners) where anything goes in the drive to produce cheaper products. Despite efforts by companies buying consumer goods from China to enforce a code of conduct, most suppliers falsify time cards, hide the use of unapproved materials and otherwise engage in dishonest practices. Western importersknow it and often look the other way. In the face of growing labor unrest and pollution, Chinese officials hope to move the economy away from reliance on exports by fostering domestic consumption. Essential reading for anyone concerned about how dangerous pet food and children's clothing manufactured in China make it into American stores.
What People Are Saying
Clyde Prestowitz
"With unusual insight and reportorial perseverance Alexandra Harney presents the inconvenient truths about China and globalization that flat worlders have overlooked. This book is very important and is a must read for those who want to understand how today's world really works."--(Clyde Prestowitz, President of the Economic Strategy Institute and the author of Three Billion New Capitalists)
Table of Contents:
Introduction: The Better Mousetrap 1Hooked 18
The Five-Star Factory 33
The Physical Cost 56
The Gold Rush 88
The Stirring Masses 106
The Girls of Room 817 148
Accounts and Accountability 181
The New Model Factory 235
The Future of the China Price 272
Acknowledgments 291
Notes 295
Bibliography 313
Index 321
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